Chapter 8: Anushka / Rhea

# Chapter 8: Anushka / Rhea

On the third day, Sulochana came to Benaulim to collect Anushka for lunch at the restaurant.

The drive back to Panjim was different from the drive down. The landscape was the same — coconut groves, paddy fields, churches rising above the tree line, but Anushka saw it differently now. She saw it through the lens of belonging, or something adjacent to belonging. These roads had been walked by Shalini at eighteen, leaving. These fields had been visible from Kasturi's kitchen window while she ground spices on the vaan. This was not Anushka's home — the Dadar flat was home, would always be home, but it was a place she was connected to by blood and bone and that specific arrangement of chromosomes that had given her Shalini's nose and Deepak's smile.

Sulochana drove in her usual silence for the first ten minutes. Then, at a traffic light in Margao, the town's single traffic light, which seemed to exist primarily as a suggestion, she said: "How was she?"

"Good. We talked. She showed me the village. She made xacuti again."

"She makes xacuti when she doesn't know what else to do. It's her default. Our mother was the same. Emotional crisis? Xacuti. Good news? Xacuti. Bored? Xacuti."

"She told me about Deepak."

"I expected she would."

"And about the shishu gruha. The ₹500 antibiotics."

Sulochana's hands tightened on the wheel. Omni's engine coughed as she shifted gears harder than necessary. "She told you the money part."

"Yes."

"That's new. She never talks about the money part. Not to me. Not to anyone." Sulochana glanced at Anushka. "You must have. I don't know. Opened something."

"Or she was ready."

"Maybe. Twenty-six years is a long time to keep something shut."

---

Sulochana's Kitchen was busier than Anushka's first visit. It was Saturday, and the lunch crowd included tourists, backpackers with sunburns and guidebooks, a family of four from Delhi whose children were loudly debating the merits of fish curry versus butter chicken, and locals, Fontainhas regulars who occupied the same tables they occupied every Saturday, their orders understood without being spoken.

Rhea was everywhere. Behind the bar, wiping glasses. In the dining room, delivering plates. In the kitchen, shouting at the young man with the bandana (whose name, Anushka learned, was Santosh) about the consistency of the coconut chutney. She moved through the restaurant like current through a circuit. Fast, purposeful, present in every room she entered.

"You're back," Rhea said when she spotted Anushka. She said it the way you'd say it to someone you'd known for years, not days. Casual. Proprietary. As if Anushka's return was expected and welcome and slightly overdue. "Sit. I'll bring you food."

"I can wait."

"Nobody waits in this restaurant. That's our whole thing. Sit."

Anushka sat at a corner table by the window, the one that looked out onto Rua de Natal. Through the lace curtain, she could see the street's Saturday rhythm: tourists photographing the painted houses, a man on a scooter delivering bread, two old women in matching housecoats walking arm-in-arm toward the church.

Rhea appeared with a plate of rava-fried fish, mackerel, golden-brown, its coating crunchy with semolina and rava, the fish underneath flaky and bright with turmeric and chilli, and a bowl of sol kadi. She sat down across from Anushka without being invited, a habit Anushka was beginning to appreciate rather than find presumptuous.

"How was Benaulim?" Rhea asked, stealing a piece of fish from Anushka's plate without asking.

"It was, a lot."

"Shalini maushi can be a lot."

"She told me things I didn't know I needed to hear."

Rhea nodded. She had that quality Anushka had noticed on the first day. The ability to receive information without performing a reaction. She listened the way a good musician listened: attentively, without inserting herself into the silence.

"Can I ask you something?" Anushka said.

"Always."

"How long have you worked here? With Sulochana."

Rhea leaned back in her chair, crossing one ankle over the other beneath the table. "Eight years. Since I was sixteen. Mavshi caught me sleeping on the beach near Miramar, I'd been living rough for about three weeks, and instead of calling the police, she brought me here, gave me food, gave me a room upstairs." She shrugged, as if being rescued from homelessness at sixteen were a minor biographical detail. "The room you slept in on your first night? That was mine for two years before I got my own flat."

"She took you in."

"She has a weakness for strays. Dogs, cats, humans. If it shows up at her door looking lost, she feeds it and gives it a job." The corner of Rhea's mouth lifted. "I'm the most productive stray she's ever collected."

"Where's your family?"

"Mapusa. My father runs a hardware shop. My mother runs a beauty parlour. They're fine people. Good people. We just — " She rotated her wrist in a gesture that encompassed a universe of family conflict. "Didn't work. I left home because I was angry at everything and they didn't know what to do with an angry girl. Mavshi knew. She put a mop in my hand and told me to be angry while cleaning floors. Turned out I was better at cleaning floors than being angry."

"And now you manage the restaurant."

"Officially, I'm the 'service coordinator.' Unofficially, I'm the person who makes sure mavshi doesn't overwork herself, Santosh doesn't burn the kitchen down, and the tourists don't steal the silverware." She stole another piece of fish. "Eat. The fish is getting cold and cold rava fish is a crime against Goa."

Anushka ate. The fish was extraordinary, the semolina crust shattering against her teeth, the flesh inside melting against her tongue, the chilli and turmeric singing in tandem, and beneath it all, the taste of the sea itself, briny and clean. She ate with her fingers, tearing the fish along its bones the way Shalini had shown her at dinner the previous night, and licked the masala from her fingertips because some foods deserved that intimacy.

---

After the lunch rush, Rhea gave Anushka a tour of Fontainhas.

Not the tourist tour — not the painted houses and the bakeries and the Instagram spots. The real Fontainhas, the one that existed behind the curated facades. The courtyard behind the old Portuguese club where local men played carrom on a battered board every evening. The tiny chapel on a back lane where the priest was ninety-two and delivered his homilies in a mix of Portuguese and Konkani that nobody fully understood but everyone attended out of affection. The house at the end of Rua 31 de Janeiro where a woman named Dona Filomena made bebinca, the layered Goan coconut cake — in a clay oven, fourteen layers, each one baked individually with live coals placed on the lid, a process that took four hours and produced something Rhea described as "closer to a religious experience than a dessert."

Rhea moved through these streets with ownership. She knew the shopkeepers by name — Bom dia, Senhor Costa, and the dogs by temperament — "That one bites, avoid him; that one drools, also avoid him", and the buildings by their histories: "This one was a school. This one was a brothel. This one was a school that was previously a brothel, which explains the architecture."

Anushka laughed more in that afternoon than she had in months. Not the polite laugh of social situations, not the performative laugh of phone conversations — the real laugh, the one that came from the diaphragm and left her gasping. Rhea was funny in a way that wasn't trying to be funny. She stated absurdities as facts and delivered punchlines as observations, and her timing was flawless — the comedian's instinct for the beat between set-up and payoff.

They ended up at a bar called Venite — tiny, on the first floor of a Portuguese building, accessed by a narrow wooden staircase that creaked under their weight. The bar had three tables, a balcony overlooking the street, and a bartender who was reading Dostoevsky behind the counter and did not look up when they entered.

"Two feni and soda," Rhea told the bartender. "The good feni, not the tourist one."

"It's all good feni," the bartender said without looking up from his book.

"The better good feni, then."

The drinks arrived in tall glasses with ice and a slice of lime. Anushka took a sip and the feni, cashew feni, clear and sharp and smelling of fruit and fire, burned a clean line down her throat and settled in her stomach with a warmth that was different from chai's warmth, different from food's warmth. This was a warmth that loosened things. Jaw muscles. Shoulder tension. The careful architecture of composure that Anushka carried with her like a second skeleton.

"So," Rhea said, her legs stretched out under the table, her glass balanced on her stomach. "How long are you staying in Goa?"

"I had three days of lessons cancelled. I need to go back."

"Hmm." Rhea sipped. "What if you didn't?"

"Didn't what?"

"Didn't go back. Not forever. Just, for longer. A week. Two weeks. You've just found your mother. You've been here three days. That's like reading the first chapter of a book and putting it down."

"I have responsibilities in Mumbai. Students. My mother. Mandakini. Her dialysis."

"Your sister can handle the dialysis. She's been doing it when you travel."

"I don't travel."

"Exactly." Rhea set her glass on the table and leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Anushka. You've spent twenty-six years being responsible. Being good. Being the daughter who shows up, the teacher who never cancels, the person who puts everyone else's needs in the queue before her own. And then you took a DNA test and got on a bus and came to Goa, which is the first genuinely selfish thing you've ever done. Don't stop now. Give yourself a week."

"You don't know me well enough to psychoanalyze me."

"I know the type. I was the type. The over-responsible one who forgot she was a person with her own needs. Mavshi broke me of it. The restaurant breaks everyone of it, eventually. Something about Goa — the heat, the feni, the pace, it erodes the armour. Gives you permission to just — be."

Anushka swirled her glass. The ice clinked. The feni caught the afternoon light and threw a prism on the table. A small, fractured rainbow on the dark wood.

"I'll think about it," she said.

"That means yes."

"That means I'll think about it."

Rhea grinned — the full, asymmetric grin, the one that crinkled her nose and made her freckles shift like constellations rearranging. "You're going to love it here. I can already tell."

---

That evening, Anushka called Tara.

"I want to stay longer."

"How much longer?"

"A week. Maybe two."

Silence. Then: "You never take time off."

"I know."

"In three years, you've taken exactly two sick days, and one of them you spent reorganizing the sheet music cabinet."

"I know."

"And now you want two weeks in Goa."

"Yes."

Another silence. Then Tara said, very quietly: "Good."

"Good?"

"Good. Finally. You've been running on empty for years, Anu. You just didn't see it because the empty felt normal." A pause. "I'll handle Aai's dialysis. I'll reschedule your students. Mrs. Kapadia will throw a fit, but I can handle Mrs. Kapadia."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. Stay. Do whatever you need to do. Find whatever you need to find. And Anu?"

"Yeah?"

"Bring me back some bebinca. The good kind, not the tourist kind."

Anushka laughed. She was standing on the verandah of Shalini's house in Benaulim, looking up at a sky full of stars — more stars than she'd ever seen from the Dadar flat, more stars than she'd known existed — and she laughed, and the sound carried across the courtyard and into the dark garden where the mango tree stood like a sentinel, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, the laugh wasn't a response to something funny. It was just joy. Simple, uncomplicated joy. The kind that arrives without permission and stays without being asked.

She was staying.